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Lumifer comments on Moloch: optimisation, "and" vs "or", information, and sacrificial ems - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (58)
One word which is notably missing from Yvain's excellent blog post is "externalities". The concept is there, but acknowledging that it's externalities we're talking about would be helpful. There is a fair amount of literature on them.
The concept is more general and more interesting than externalities. One of Ethiopian coffee-grower examples was about asymmetric information, not externalities. And sacrificing everything superfluous to stay competitive is a good description of what firms do, and is generally seen as positive in economics.
Well, I'm not convinced there is a single concept involved. What Yvain talks about is complex and multilayered. There are externalities and information asymmetries and attractor basins, etc. If I was forced to pick one expression I'd say something like emergent system behaviour, but that's not quite it either.
Beg to disagree. That is one factor which drives their behaviour and a major one, too, but there are others as well.
Am I the only one who didn't feel like the central Moloch concept was hard to reach? As I understand it, "Moloch" just refers to a specific kind of coordination failure, in which participants in a competitive market-like environment "defect" by throwing their own values under the bus, to no ultimate gain besides a temporary positional advantage over those who do not do so. Obviously this phenomenon can create/contribute to various eschatological attractor basins, of the paperclip-tiles/disneyland-with-no-children sort; without the "Moloch" concept it might be non-obvious that/why a marketplace of agents with human values could end up in such a situation.